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More Compulsory Math Lessons Do Not Encourage Women To Pursue STEM Careers, Study Finds (phys.org)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The demand for employees in STEM careers (science, technology, engineering and math) is particularly high, as corporations compete to attract skilled professionals in the international market. What is known as "curriculum intensification" is often used around the world to attract more university entrants -- and particularly more women -- to these subjects; that is to say, students have on average more mandatory math courses at a higher level. Scientists from the LEAD Graduate School and Research Network at the University of Tubingen have now studied whether more advanced math lessons at high schools actually encourages women to pursue STEM careers. Their work shows that an increase in advanced math courses during two years before the final school-leaving exams does not automatically create the desired effects. On the contrary: one upper secondary school reform in Germany, where all high school students have to take higher level math courses, has only increased the gender differences regarding their interests in activities related to the STEM fields. The young female students' belief in their own math abilities was lower after the reform than before. The results have now been published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.
I've been studying ballerinas and still for the life of me can't become one.
Big fat gut gets in the way. And my beard.
The needed more STEM people, and while the number of female students stayed the same, the number of male entries increased, so that's a good result.
So, if you force people who are not good at math to do more of it, they will eventually figure out that they are not good at it and avoid it? Well, lets just do other things to force them into a field that they will not be good in. Anything but admit that there might actually be valid differences in the sexes.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Girls like to play with dolls. When they get older they like to have babies. That is what their biological purpose in life really is. When women get older and menopausal, they get a couple of dogs (or cats) and treat them like baby dolls. It is programmed into their nature.
Has anyone actually walked out of a primary/secondary mathematics education with the feeling of being more competent in mathematics as more than just a false sense of understanding?
Even if you push stories that appear to balance the usual spin, I still want far less of this.
So, please, msmash, just latch onto something else already?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
...to be interested in something. People tend to pursue careers that interest them, at least when they have the choice to do so. The kid interested in the heavens goes to study astronomy. The kid interested in clothing looks for a career in fashion design. And you're not going to make the cosmos kid into a Hilfiger, no matter how hard you try. Who gives a shit which one is a boy and which one is a girl?
Well I think the way to deal with this problem is pretty clear: mathematics must be removed from the STEM fields because mathematics is sexist.
We can't tolerate something as bigoted as mathematics. It may be a challenge, but we'll need to start doing science and engineering without using any sort of mathematics.
We'll also need to drop the "M" from STEM, too. So from now on it will just be "STE".
I just want to say thank you to the mods. I have been reading the site for more than 8 years now, so long that I check Slashdot to see if my internet is working when things are flaky. Kudos to the editors/mods, the quality of the articles you guys have posted/approved has really improved a lot. All the stories I see on the front page are engagement-driven and cover a few topics that you guys would have ignored in the past.
The misogynerd narrative! Push it! I need more misogynerd narrative! Tell me why sexual harassment is the only reason! Tell me why I'm a rapist who merely hasn't been caught in the act yet!
Wall Street must be absolutely free of sexual harassment! Nobody ever gets sexually harassed on Wall Street! Otherwise we'd hear about how sexist Wall Street is and how there's a huge push to get more womyn-born-womyn investment bankers!
Build it up! Build it up! Build it up!
When abortion becomes illegal, this will be instrumental in the retribution feminism is planning.
By adding these higher-level math courses so late in their education, you are pretty much confirming to them that 'math is hard' and simply demonstrating the existing bias.
All children need to be introduced to 'real math' at a very young age to avoid these built in failure points
I had older neighbors (pretty much family) who I used to pester while they studied their high-schools math classes.
I was curious and they were willing to teach me how algebra worked
It was simple to learn because I was able to hijack their won learning process for my own
As the years progressed I saw both teachers and students fail to understand the most basic concepts while building and re-enforcing bad logic habits.
I do not think that I am special in any way, just privileged to have been introduced at a young age
If schools would allow children to have exposure to people who really understand math at younger ages, then we would not see these failures when they are finally dumped into a real class and cannot keep up
I'm not sure why anyone would think any person would be receptive to anything "compulsory" or "forced" whether math, religion, or whatever.
Why this is shocking or unusual I have no idea. You cant
"force" someone to believe in something they don't. Sorry.
In post-secondary education, class sizes are often at least partially based on the nature of what's being taught and if the subject requires student to student interaction or not. Some classes can have as few as a dozen students even for undergrad studies, and other classes may have 150+ in a lecture hall. Others still may have a hybrid; weekly lectures and also weekly small-group studies.
in high schools though, typically all subject have approximately the same number of students per class, with the exception of some fine-arts programs where a band director may have a hundred students or where an auto shop teacher may have fifteen to twenty simply because of a lack of interest.
Perhaps it makes sense to start looking how various subjects benefit from smaller class sizes. In particular, subjects where student to student interaction is almost as important as student to teacher interaction probably are not as-helped by smaller class sizes. Social Studies classes where the curriculum calls for students to discuss issues and their relative merits both as contemporary events and as historical ones may not require smaller classes, but mathematics, where students are learning from a combination of the rote facts of the textbook and from the teacher's instruction probably could disproportionately benefit from smaller class sizes, so that when students struggle the teacher has more time per pupil to address those struggles.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I guess if we can't convince women to go into the roles that some SJW wants we'll just have to force them. For the greater good of course. This is already being brought up as shown here: http://www.dailytelegraph.com....
They need to be told that they're interested in mathematics. If they disagree they should be sent away for thought correction treatment.
If the thought correction fails, then it's clearly all the fault of the evil heterosexual white male oppressors! The white males are keeping women out of science, even though they desperately want to work in a scientific field!
Who gives it a fuck.
If they broaden that scope a bit, they might note that STEM degrees are in decline overall. ( Unless you're in India )
Due, in no small part, to the current business practice of bringing in H1-B labor for pennies on the dollar. The reasoning being to cut wage costs for everyone who isn't at the executive pay scale. All the while playing the victim card of " We can't find qualified candidates locally " ( Translates to: We don't want to pay domestic market wages for this position )
In this work environment, it wouldn't matter if folks were given access to the most amazing math classes the world has to offer. The folks capable of taking those classes are all too aware of what awaits them in that career field, post education. Debt, with little chance of getting a decent paying job if they have to compete with the H1-B folks.
The smart ones simply choose not to play the game and find another career choice.
Regardless of gender.
I think these girls just moved on on the Dunning-Kruger curve.
According to Dunning-Kruger, people who are incompetent believe themselves to be highly competent, because they don't realise how stupid they are. As they become more competent, they realise more of what they don't know and feel they are less competent. Once they are competent, they think that they are probably just average. Only people who are highly competent have the same level of confidence as the total incompetents.
So I think these girls were on the part of the curve where more competence shows you more things you don't know, and makes you feel less competent. It's the move from "how hard can it be" to "this is hard". They need some more lessons to move on to "it's not that hard after all".
While you sit in the corner sobbing?
...that found that some people are naturally innies and some are outies despite their doors being forced to go both ways...
Greater ability leads to greater insight into where things actually stand and less confidence. In my experience nothing is ever completely worth what it will cost you, and the more you know, the more appealing other options look.
Pushing people into STEM might not be in their best interest as far as having a happy life. Fix that and you might be able to ethically get more women involved.
People who get demoralized by math, probably shouldn't pursue a career in a STEM field.
I think this is in fact the real danger of an effort like this - because what you are saying may be conventional wisdom but it is TOTALLY wrong.
The thing is that math is pretty much taught one way across schools and if that way does not agree with you, that says nothing about your ability to be good with various STEM fields or even math for that matter.
I was a late bloomer, as it were, in my relation to math. I didn't really enjoy it pre college, and had trouble with in in college until somehow near the very end it all just clicked and I was fine.
But I was programming, and enjoying programing, long before that point. And even while I was having lots of trouble with basic courses like statistics and calculus, I was getting A/A+ in things like algorithm classes that also required math...
It seems to me that other STEM fields need people who like "traditional" math even less - like biology.
So what an effort to make more math classes mandatory could be doing is actually driving away people from STEM fields who would otherwise like it. It seems more like what should be done is to make a variety of classes that make each STEM field as interesting as possible in order to draw you in to the topic, so that you enjoy the math required to enter the field because now it's not just pure concepts but has some grounding.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I honestly think something's wrong with this strategy. Since when is teaching math which is usually a dry / boring subject going to make someone interested in STEM fields? I'm a Computer Science graduate in the field and although math is important, in real life you usually don't need anything past high school in typical daily programming. Do the science first! I remember when I was young, I was attracted to the computer first whether it was programming to make it do things for me or just flat out gaming. It was later that math became interesting because I realized it gave me to tools to do what I wanted to do. If you try to make computers interesting by first burying them in complex and or difficult to understand math, I am almost certain you'll have the opposite effect.
So, if you force people who are not good at math to do more of it, they will eventually figure out that they are not good at it and avoid it?
Actually, bizarrely, that is not what happened. If you RTFA it seems that the extra course decreased the gap in the maths skills between the men and women i.e. the women benefitted from the course more than the men but still ranked lower on average. However it decreased the women's confidence in their maths skills whereas for the men it was unchanged. So paradoxically the course did a great job in better preparing women for STEM careers while simultaneously making them think that they were unsuited for a STEM career.
What is needed now is some psychological study to figure out why women developed such a gap between their actual maths skills and the perceived maths skills while the men did not. If someone could figure out that perhaps we can develop a better way of teaching maths and physics that imparts the required knowledge without the drop in confidence.
Can we just accept that different people like different things, and that maybe, just MAYBE, some of these might be related to gender?
I don't keep up on the news for other industries. Are there big pushes elsewhere to get more men into female-dominated professions?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
They want every kid in school to learn to code. I said good luck with that.
I (quite happily) learned tons of math during my years of schooling, I haven't needed 99% of it. Math is pretty useless towards STEM careers, unfortunately.
So forcing people to study X does not make them want a career in X. Shocking!
In related news, redundancy is redundantly redundant.
Table-ized A.I.
Hens usually lay more than two eggs at a time.
The STEM lead never made any sense when SV CEOs used it as an excuse to give away US jobs to maggot wranglers or bring in maggots from maggot wranglers using the corrupt and broken US visa system. Most modern programming does not need a storng math background and engineering is more about applied maths anyway.
So, not enough women are getting into STEM?
Obvious solution? Make it harder!!
Jaysus H. Tap-dancing Christ, they'll get all the math they want when they start seriously getting into STEM in university. Trying to weed out people in High School is NOT the solution to the problem.
If anything, de-emphasizing the math might be a (partial) solution. Amazing how seldom you actually use higher math when coding (mind you, an engineer or scientist had better have more than a nodding familiarity with higher math)....
But throwing up more barriers isn't going to make it more likely to get women interested.
Oh, well, it gave some more guys a chance to find out they could handle this whole math thing, so we'll have more STEM candidates by and by....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Says the whipped cuck with the battleaxe 'wife.' Keep telling yourself you're happy.
well duh women are designed to raise children. men are what dominate in this field. nothing new and it won't ever change.
In my experience, the best way to make students hate a subject is to force them to do more of it.
It's almost as though there is an inherent male bias in the way math is taught. But that can't possibly be true, because math was taught almost exclusively by and to males for centuries until just a few decades ago.
Oh, wait...
So...wait...despite excessive incentivizing, women still don't flood into stem fields?
That's so weird, because if you listen to some of the loudest voices today, gender is a social construct with no underlying biology, therefore changing social conditions should result in a change of gendered behaviors.
Are we yet at the point where we can accept there are biological differences between the genders and skin colors which predispose them to certain fields, and thus stop playing the "DIVERSITY" game?
hahahhahaha
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
....you would almost think that women are ACTIVELY CHOOSING not to do STEM or something....
For some reason when the going gets rough in math or CS the women much more apt to give up than the guys. It's like they're not satified unless they're getting an "A". The guys will slog along with a "B" or "C" and they're just fine with it. Not sure why. No science here, just an observation.
Sure, there are always exceptions, but if you want to be smart about doing the most with a limited education budget, it's smarter to go by general rules that apply to 99% of the people.
So many of the best programmers I have seen have had similar mixed bags with math that I tend to think people are are really into math and good at coding, are more the exception than the rule.
Part of the reason that is, real programming is not as "pure" as math. Some of the most advanced math students I know (like mathematics grad student at Yale level good) don't like programming, at all.
Also like I said, I'm not even sure liking traditional math is anything but orthogonal to being good at some STEM fields like chemistry or biology.
So I really don't think it serves anyone well to tie mandatory math around everyone's neck to sink many STEM students (male and female) before they can find a calling.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Men and women are different, physically AND mentally and while there may be some environmental factors (like maybe being given 'girly' toys etc as a child) the fact remains that our interests differ wildly.
It's simple fact that men prefer technical and scientific fields while women prefer creative fields, this is something we all know but nobody is willing to accept.
Trying to push women into a field they don't want to pursue simple to make up the numbers isn't going to fix anything. It's going to result in a lot of miserable people from both sexes and result in more (real or perceived) sexism.
Just encourage those who enjoy STEM subjects and the numbers will naturally find a balance; whether that balance fits your 'everyone is equal so all jobs must be 50/50' is immaterial. People matter not your god damn statistics.
just saying...
Is there anything that compulsory anything encourages except wanting to get the hell out of the situation?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Women and men are generally different on a number of levels. Equality of opportunity is OK, trying to force everyone to be the same isn't.
And if equality were truly important we wouldn't have women's hockey or female-only Olympic events. Fuck the sexist Olympic organizers for their outdated attitude. Let's get the fatties out marching against them ffs.
I'd spoken to my few female students in my classes using Minecraft to teach programming/server administration as well as my robotics classes. The general reason girl don't get into STEM is a social sigma. One new student at MIT said many girls felt being in tech was "anti-social" or "unfeminine" . It's not lack of knowledge availbility, it has more to do with media brainwashing that often creates a negative feel to participants in the tech industry, especially for young women. The show "The Big Bang Theory" didn't exactly help matters in my opinion. People see people in robotics and programming in particular as people who do nothing but plan, diagram and code. People still think techies don't talk to people, are shy and have no friends. Many girls think it's "uncute" to be a techie or doing stuff with "tech guys". While SOME progress has been made in removing the anti-social stereotype that still follows the "geeks" and "nerds" we need to teach people the social aspects of the creation process in STEM fields.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
You seem to imply that men and women would be proving to best learning topics in the same way. Please explain how in your imaginary world that happens.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While math is important in stem, many STEM fields don't use a lot of math beyond a basic understanding of how things work. They might use a lot of programming, advance statistics, and sample theory etc.. Straight up math? Hell no.
I suck at math (solving ODEs, laplace transforms, PDEs), but I am successful at biomedical engineering because most sub fields do not require it (image processing, developing new statistical methods, in vivo/ in vitro experiments).
Damn those women for freely making their own life choices! Can't they see that they're messing up my self-evidently correct social agenda by not marching in lock-step with it?
because it's still a viable career. I've said this before, I'll say it again: Bring the jobs and us parents will bring the kids. Until they stop outsourcing and pushing for cheap labor imports we're not going to encourage our kids to go into programming unless the kid's such a natural that they rise above that cheap foreign labor.
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If all else fails to encourage women to pursue something or other, but if you really really really want them to, try forcing them at gunpoint. Works with men, too.
Here is the thing: I have been teaching CS at a dutch university for thirty years. On our university, CS was obligatory, even for humanities students (which I think is a very good thing). About 80% of our students were women. Some of my best students were women, doing PhD trajects with heavy math, computers and statistics. No gender differences there.
But... and this is a big but... most of the female students just could not be bothered. They enrolled at the university because they were intelligent but ALSO wanted an occupation indoors without heavy lifting. And they were not above using their attributes to get a pass. It is not because I am male: my female collegues in the STEM department had the same experience (it is the Netherlands I am talking about - grin).
So all girls out there: stop whining about unequal opportunities. Do your assignments just like the boys. If you don't like maths or CS, just skip it - but don't expect to compete seriously in the world outside, without using your attributes, that is.
I *like* your attributes and they keep the world turning. But it is not maths.
Paai
a bunch of wealthy capitalists tired of paying $100k/yr for a decent programmer are. Pull your head out of your ass. Not everything you don't like is the fault of SJWs. They're a small, vocal minority. Like religious nuts. The difference is the left ignores their nuts when it comes to policy. This is no different. Getting women into tech isn't a left wing policy. It's a right wing one used to depress wages. Hell, Beth Warren wrote a book on it ("The Two Income Trap"). Go read it sometime. It's great.
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In other news, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The one outcome of teaching girls more math is that they have fewer children.
A study across Japan, German and several other countries found the more mathematics a woman had, the few children they had.
It had no effect on men's reproductive rates. The extremes were especially noticeable. Poor African countries had the most children while Phds in Japan had the fewest.
Likely Muslims implicitly understand this and keep their girls out of school.
The solution for a lot of Africa's ills would be more education for the females of that continent.
And why exactly should women care about maths more than they already do? Because men said so?
In order to get a degree in medicine or the related disciplines (such as immunology), an undergraduate science degree is usually counted. That should +1 to STEM statistics, although I am not sure whether the resulting practitioner is counted post-school. Given the chance, for example, of being a bio PhD and having problems finding work and an MD, or even a high-end/tech nurse, I can see how choices are being driven.
PhD's in chemistry face the same problem - difficulties finding and keeping jobs in Pharma, severe difficulties finding work in academia. Ramming math down people's throats won't help staff bio and the medical arts. And Physics degrees, in and of themselves, are a tough row to hoe for employment: academia, government labs, or translated into numerical modeling positions.
Very few of these kinds of positions/people are similar to the coders/developers people think STEM means. Hell, some of the angel investors counsel against any kind of degree as a ways of one's startup years. Mashing everything into a single classification isn't really useful.
I don't recall saying "Koch Bros". Motherfning Zuckerberg is _not_ a progressive lefty. Hell, he just found God in advance of running for office. None of those guys are progressives. That's my point. Saying we shouldn't burn homosexuals (or if you're being nice about it "convert" them to hetro) doesn't make you a progressive. There's a whole world of economics and workers rights these guys don't give two shits about. Hell, they don't really care about the LGBTQs, they just don't like bad press
Yes, right wing is bad. The policies of the right wing ( Trickle Down economics, religious extremism & opposition to science, privatization of the commons, etc, etc) are objectively bad. Everywhere they've been tried they've been a disaster (re: Kansas).
Finally, the Dems _aren't_ progressives. Bill the Clinton moved them hard right to get into the White House in the 90s. He shifted the whole country right. Why the heck do you think we just elected Donny Trump over Bill's wife? It was a choice between a populist demagogue & a Republican. America picked Donald Trump because, heh, what did we have to lose.
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Nearly all, if not all great scientists love their subject. Many of those who find maths or science a turn-off do not choose STEM careers. The emotional connection of a student to their discipline must not be neglected: we are humans, not programmable machines. Only if you engender a positive interest and desire in people will they be inspired to take up STEM careers, or indeed have a casual interest, whilst pursuing other careers.
John_Chalisque
Just like multiplication tables are made obsolete by calculators, is nightmare algebra a problem when you have Maple or Mathematica?
or our fringes. We own that. It's also not what the right wing press tells you it is. They'll tell you it's giving unqualified black men a job that rightfully belonged to a qualified white guy. They say it with a dog whistle but they still say it.
All AA really says is that if 10% of the population is black and you don't have 10% blacks you better have a reason for that and it better be documented. For most that just means keeping resume's around. That's it. Book it. Done.
OTOH, if you're a racist POS who's too cowardly to admit your racism you don't get to hide behind "It's my business, I'll hire who I want!". When you opened a public business you joined the public. Don't like it? There's a perfectly good cave in the Ozarks. You will not be missed.
And nice straw man. Care to bother addressing any of my actual points? Probably not. You'll lose.
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As they say, the compulsion will continue until intrinsic motivation improves.
I find it helpful, when hearing about problems a given demagraphic has... if I can subsitute any other X and its probably true, then the qualifier probably is not needed.
SO was it Just women it didn't help? I'm curious
insisting there's something wrong if 50% of any given job market is staffed by women.
Except that's not what they insist. As has been pointed out many times, nobody gets bent out of shape over these facts:
- Women are vastly underrepresented in the field of trash collection
- Women are overrepresented in the field of nursing
But women underrepresented in STEM? That's a CRISIS!!!
since you're wrong and all.
It's child's play to keep those records. If you can't keep them it's because you're either a) Staggeringly incompetent or b) Committing acts of racial discrimination. If that's what you want folks to be able to do then come right out and say it why don't you. Man up and put the dog whistle down.
Our laws were designed to combat institutionalized racism. That's actually a thing, you know, and not something Uncle Bill O'rielly scares his children with at night (he used the bruises on his ex for that). The entire South had built up discrete institutions to enforce racist policies without codifying them in law. The only thing that broke that is when the Feds moved in and made rules like AA that didn't let them get away with that bullshit. It's like when you try to pass laws controlling banks without rules requiring proof that they followed those rule. The banks don't follow the rules. Who the fuck knew?
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well, they check a box. Haven't you ever filled out a job app?
And a major study just showed 25% of the country still harbor racism. Hilary's "Deplorables" comment was based on sound science. That's just F'd up. Or how about some anecdotal evidence. My black truck drivin' buddy had trouble getting runs because it wasn't safe for his driver manager to send him down through the South.
And maybe if we wouldn't defund those kids primary schools they wouldn't struggle when they hit college. Maybe if we wouldn't fund schools with property taxes so asshat rich people could get out of paying for poor kids schools things would turn out different. Maybe if we actually did _more_ about institutionalized racism instead of pretending it's not a thing. Not a chance with guys like you lying to yourself to feel better. But hey, you feel better, right?
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